Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 8 March 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government

Provision of Traveller Accommodation: Discussion

9:30 am

Photo of Damien EnglishDamien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Chair for her comments. First, I welcome the positivity of Deputy Ó Broin and his party towards what we are trying to do here with the expert review recommended by the National Traveller Accommodation Consultative Committee, NTACC. The NTACC is the policy group which would make recommendations to me and I work closely with it. Like that, if positive suggestions come forward, we will certainly move on them as quickly as we possibly can. I welcome the support of Deputy Ó Broin, and I am sure others here, for us to do that. I want to put that on the record too. At the start, I stated that I welcome the committee's interest in this area because all of us together, politically, need to work on this because it is quite clear that some areas are failing in their duties on this and we will have to make these changes if necessary or find new ways to do our business as quickly as we possibly can.

On the specific question of what we are doing to try to get the money spent, the number one priority has been to get increased resources allocated. We have been working on that across social housing projects, including Traveller-specific accommodation. It is a welcome increase in funding, but it is not much use if we do not get it spent where we want it. There was an underspend last year. We tried to use that in recent months and allocated it to buy other accommodation which can be used for Traveller-specific accommodation as well. It should end up in the right place but it is not the project we wanted to happen. We are engaging directly with some local authorities in specific areas to track projects that should be moving through the system and that are not. I myself visited a number of sites recently. I will do more of that over the months ahead, try to track them, and push the agenda and push the question mark over what is happening. We have also moved to quarterly reports to try to follow and monitor the money and make sure it is being spent because it is not good enough that we say in the Dáil come September or October that only 50% has been spent and that we hope to spend it before Christmas when that does not happen. We will track those projects more clearly. We are bringing greater focus to this.

Looking at the report, the issues include site selection and planning. For whatever reason, I would say there is a lack of commitment in certain counties. There is no point in denying that. There is also the issue of effective assessment of the needs. There is much work to be done with all the various groups and stakeholders on assessment of the genuine needs and demand for Traveller-specific accommodation versus traditional social housing and getting that accommodation right. In some cases there is also a need to address the issue of overcrowding. Often some of these issues are just not resolved and then we get inaction. As a Department, we are trying to focus on the areas where money has been allocated and where projects are not moving forward. We are also focusing on trying to drive that through and deal with the issues that are blocking some of the delivery. In some cases it means we need to have much more consultation to strengthen the relationship with members of the Traveller community, certainly on some sites, and try to work more closely through local authorities.

In some cases those relationships have disintegrated as opposed to getting better. We are trying to work on that because we will not get action here if we do not change the system and that connection or relationship as well.

They are the key areas. In terms of policy changes, it involves working with the NTACC to bring in those changes. There was the initial report analysing what has happened over recent years. There have been numerous reports over the past 20 years from different committees. I read some of the reports from the early 1990s and the issues have not changed very much. That is the reason for having the expert group. It should be a small panel of independent experts. Nobody has any nominating rights to that group and it is to be hoped we will get the expertise we need to make decisions. It will make recommendations to us to enable us to make the changes, whether they relate to planning, site selection, working with local authorities or whatever it takes.

The report also mentions the monitoring, which is tracking that money and making sure it is spent. They are the types of changes we have made in general to the social housing spend across the various sites and programmes. It is about tracking the money and putting a project management team in place if necessary to make it happen. The same emphasis will be brought to Traveller-specific accommodation as well.

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